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Inside Castro's Gulag
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11363 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1986 |
4,543 Words |
| Author
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Daniel James
Daniel James has written extensively on Cuba. He is the author
of Cuba: First Soviet Satellite in the Americas and Che
Guevara: a Bibliography, and editor-translator of The Complete
Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara and Other Captured Documents. |
The world refused to believe reports coming out of Russia in the early 1930s of Joseph Stalin's forced collectivization of peasants that cost millions of lives. Nor did it credit accounts later in the decade which revealed that millions of other Soviet citizens, including "Old Bolsheviks" and second-generation communists, had been condemned to slave-labor camps. In those days, the Soviet Union was considered to be a "progressive" society, hence, by definition incapable of committing barbaric acts.
The world found difficulty believing that Hitler, evil though he was, could commit an enormity like the holocaust until World War II was almost over. We knew, of course, after November 1938 when Der Fuhrer launched his Kristalnacht pogroms throughout Germany, that he was guided by genocidal impulses. But our most sophisticated wartime leaders could not accept, at first, reports of the Reich's wanton murder of six million Jews and additional millions who belonged to various other nationalities.
Man's inhumanity to man is so . . . inhuman, that we often stand before it in openmouthed disbelief. Today, terrorist killings take place with such frequency around the globe that we are rendered numb with incredulity and horror. We realize that they are a grim reality, as all-too-graphic portrayals on television drive home to us. In one week alone, four car bombings killed scores of innocent bystanders in Beirut, while in far-off Bogota terrorists machine gunned a supreme court justice close to the spot where they had killed the minister of justice two years before.
And what about the equally insane horrors committed by the rulers of states? By the
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